At this very moment, there is something of a revolution occurring around the world, sweeping through almost every facet of the human condition–psychological, spiritual, cultural, political, technological, ecological, etc.  All the old and partial approaches to reality are being questioned, and new and more integral responses are being explored, laying the foundation for an entirely new era in human civilization.

It is not the first revolution the world has ever seen, and it will certainly not be the last. But it is the first that does not insist that everyone adopt a new philosophy, a new worldview, or a new monolithic way of being—even while new philosophies, new worldviews, and new ways of being are constantly laid down as we speak.  It is a revolution that fully embraces us wherever we may be in our own development and allows us to be who we already are—even while it points out all those aspects of our lives where we still need to grow.

Welcome to the Integral Revolution, history’s response to the observation that “problems cannot be solved from the same level of thinking that created them.” We’ve been handed an entirely new set of problems and complexities that would have been unimaginable just fifty years ago, bringing us ever closer to fulfilling our limitless potential as conscious and compassionate human beings, slowly bootstrapping our way to infinity. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the fifth and final installment of an ongoing series. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

We step onto the massive stone body of the Sioux, what appeared to be the ruins of an age-old epic battle between titan and medusa. We sense a profound air of sacredness as our feet plant themselves on the monument—talk about standing on the shoulders of giants; they don’t get much more giant than this.

Looking up, his visage towers above us. It is indescribably massive—we had just seen Mt. Rushmore before coming here, being only a twenty minute drive away, and felt the obligatory awe and wonderment and pseudo-patriotism that comes along with seeing the forefathers staring off into the horizon.

“Wow, George, Abe, Tom, and the other guy—who is that again? Wow. Okay let’s go smoke a bowl.”

Mt. Rushmore was mildly impressive, though cliché had certainly eclipsed genuine admiration, like seeing Niagara Falls after watching Superman II a dozen times as a kid. But this—this is different. This is intense! It is overwhelming—his face is eighty-five feet tall, his immense proboscis looming forty feet above us, nostrils flared in proud defiance. It is absolutely breathtaking.

I stand there, wrapped in reverie as I attempt to internalize what is happening. I think of the whole escapade, the delicate precision of circumstance that placed us exactly where we are. I think of Aphex’s birth at the inception of the very idea to leave home, as well as her role in our decision to climb up here. I think of the randomness of deciding to move to Oregon, and how surprised I was that I had chosen Oregon—almost like throwing a dart at a map. I think of the tragic irony of Kate’s decision to stay behind, and how my transportation somehow manifested through her decision. I am most definitely in some sort of Kerouacian bardo realm, on the road in-between lifetimes, dying to myself while being born for the very first time. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the fourth installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

Here we are, still as the petrified Sioux we are perched upon, waiting to see what will become of us. I look down to my companions. Sean is directly behind me, Nena (a squat Russian hippie girl who was accompanying our cross-country journey) a few yards behind him. We exchange exhilarated grins. None of us can believe we are where we are. I think of the absurdity of it all, sharing such an intimately pivotal and defining experience with people I hadn’t known before a few days ago.

It was another string of oddly threaded circumstance that brought us together to share this experience, commencing with Kate’s decision not to move to Oregon with me. In so many ways she had been the hinge of my decision—I would not have been able to make such a drastic decision alone. I was too accustomed to fear to do something so bold. But she had come to the conclusion that it would be in her (and my) best interest not to come with me. She broke my heart. I was hoping that, after nearly two years of unilateral desire, this would finally bring us together, forcing our two souls to merge in the crucible of a single big experience.

So when she withdrew, I felt a tremendous rug being pulled from beneath my feet. But this decision had already snowballed, having reached such a momentum that I really felt that if I allowed this to fall through, no one—including myself—would ever be able to take me seriously again. So I was going to do it alone, picking up my roots and transplanting them to the other side of the continent. I would wait to see what happens. This was going to be a challenge, to both my personal integrity as well as to my faith. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the third installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

The Climb: Part III

It was quite literally because of Aphex the Cat that we were up here, perched on this mountain-sized monument carved deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She was, when it comes down to it, the one who made the decision to violate the clearly posted NO TRESSPASSING signs to become a little more acquainted with the famous Sioux’s massive effigy.

I had paid twenty dollars to see this monument, which I first became fascinated with while watching a documentary about its construction on the Discovery channel. It was a privately funded tribute to Crazy Horse, a massive statue carved from an entire mountain. I remember hearing that the United States had offered the family in charge of its construction however many millions of dollars it would require to finish the project within the next ten years. The family declined the offer, however, as they did not believe it was appropriate for the U.S. government to front money for a tribute to the Native Americans. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the second installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

The Climb: Part II

I begin to think of the incredible sequence of events that brought me to this very precarious point in time and space. I remember getting off the phone with Kate, a tall and freckled beauty with closely shaven copper-red hair and a long, slender, graceful body that belied her clumsy mannerisms. A newly un-closeted (and highly enthusiastic) lesbian, she was one of my very closest friends, and I had the terrible misfortune of being completely and hopelessly in love with her.

Exhilarated by our decision to abandon all we had known and move somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere we had never been. When I got off the phone with Kate, I was anxious to immediately call someone else and share my excitement.  So I called my roommate Allison, a bulimic chef who I happened to be living with at the time in Boston—which itself was ridiculous, since she lived in the room directly next to mine and I could have just walked over or yelled through the wall if I wanted. But I called her anyway, and I told her everything. I told her how we made a drastic life decision to leave school, to do something new. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know where—but it would really be something, and we were going to do it together! I told her all this, and she expressed her happiness, how wonderful this would be for us, how much we will grow because of this, how….

She suddenly interrupted herself. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature (compared with the ever-so slightly less immature voice, style, and realization i now possess), this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

The full piece is rather long, so i have decided to serialize it into five consecutive installments, which will be published here throughout the week.

The Climb: Part I

“One day I will leave this world and dream myself to Reality…” Crazy Horse, 1874

We are surrounded.  On all sides, a horde of mechanical dinosaurs roar their thunderous roars, ricocheting chaotically off the rubble. The stone wall of the mountain reflects the noise in all directions, flooding our ears with liquid concrete, entombing us in sonic opacity. It is a symphony of white noise that shifts and undulates with each movement of the head. There is no way of telling where the industrial growl is coming from; it sounds like they are everywhere. As our paranoia approaches a boil, so does the intensity of our aspiration—we had come this far; there is no turning back now.

Where am I? I am somewhere in between dreams, surfing the turning page in between chapters. What am I doing? I am fleeing a former me, reaching for a deeper I, struggling to create myself anew, molding my self into something meaningful, something real. In a flash I had seen my own Face, and I yearned to chisel out some vague likeness within myself. Read the rest of this entry

Previously:

Every now and again, pop culture is forced to reinvent itself. Like an epic drama among Hindu deities, our collective tastes are born, destroyed, and reborn again, swinging like a massive pendulum from one aesthetic extreme to the other. As a new cultural niche becomes more and more popularized, what typically begins as fierce artistic independence eventually devolves into reckless overindulgence, and creative novelty slowly bleeds away until all that is left is a formulaic husk used to manufacture tomorrow’s next fads. It is usually at this point, when a particular scene becomes so over-saturated that it can no longer support the weight of its own excess, that the entire scene will die an often-humiliating death, bloated and alone on an unflushed toilet.

In the 1980’s, the music scene in America was dominated by the glut and theatrics of “glam metal.” For nearly 10 years, most of popular music was defined by sex, drugs, and machismo-in-drag, and an entire generation of youth nearly lost themselves within a cloud of hairspray. There was a void in the cultural heart of the musical mainstream that was dying to be filled—an utter lack of artistic interiority, emotional depth, and authenticity. Untold millions were craving artistic substance, and were only offered artificial decadence. Read the rest of this entry

As a way to commemorate this sad and tragic day in world history, i thought i would take a moment to compile some of the more provocative and politically-oriented audio, video, and written materials from Integral Life. It is my hope that the knowledge and insight gleaned from this content can help each of us hold the impossible heartbreak of the world’s pain in our open and tender hearts, offering our most compassionate blessings to every man, woman, and child who continues to struggle under the weight of our brutally fragmented world.

Note: I’ve decided to make many of these pieces available for free for the very first time, so that you can feel free to share and circulate them however you wish.

A Tale of Four Americas

Corey W. deVos & Clint Fuhs

A Tale of Four Americas takes a look at the political dynamics and cultural perspectives that influence every part of the Republican and Democratic parties. It explores the ideological divides that exist within each party, and offers a simple map to help make sense of these seemingly conflicting beliefs.

Integral Trans-Partisan Politics

Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

Ken Wilber discusses the many problems facing the emergence of a genuinely Integral “Third-Way” political party, most notably the issue of developmental elitism, and offers a remarkably simple-but-effective definition of the political Left and Right.

The Deconstruction of the World Trade Center

Ken Wilber

In this fascinating footnote to the book Boomeritis, written in 2002, Ken discussions the many sorts of reactions people had to the tragedy of 9/11, while also presenting a theoretical framework within which a genuinely Integral approach to politics and governance might emerge.

Politics in the 21st Century

Jim Garrison & Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

In this fascinating 3-part dialogue between Ken Wilber and chairman and president of the State of the World Forum Jim Garrison, the topics range from the increasingly dangerous crises happening around the globe to America’s transition from republic to empire to the ability for Integral consciousness to face the precarious challenges of the 21st century head on.

Is an Integral World Federation Possible?

Ken Wilber

Here Ken discusses the work that is being done by Integral Institute, Integral Life, and Jim Garrison’s State of the World Forum to help move toward a genuine integral “World Federation” government—one capable of meeting the complex and tightly-interconnected nature of our 21st-century problems with the clarity, compassion, and decisiveness they require.

The Integral-Political Imperative

James S. Turner & Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

In this three-part series, James Turner, a founding pioneer in Integral forms of law, politics, and federal regulation talks with Ken about his days with Ralph Nader, 18th-century American political history, the essential ingredients of an Integral approach to politics, and the meaning of “trans-partisan” politics.

One Person, One Vote—One Catch

Ken Wilber

Here Ken discusses the dangers of “one person, one vote” approaches to democracy. If we consider the fact that people grow through three major stages of development—ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric—and then try to get a sense of where the majority of the people current exists, we find that nearly 70% of the world’s population remains at an ethno-centric stage or lower. Democracy is inherently a world-centric system of governance, and “one person, one vote” an ideal way to enact the democratic process. But if the majority of the voters have not themselves achieved a world-centric level of consciousness, it begins to fall apart pretty quickly, with effects as broad as Kansas banning the teaching of evolution to the democratic election of Hamas in Palestine—even the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (aka the Nazis) came into power through a plurality election in 1933. Although one does not garner a tremendous amount of popularity criticizing the “one person, one vote” ethic, without a sophisticated understanding of how this system of governance actually plays itself out in the real world, and without finding some way to limit the influence of pre-rational beliefs and mob-rule, democracy can actually become the last best hope for fascism in the 21st century.

Spiral Dynamics and the Palestine/Israel Conflict

Don Beck & Jeff Salzman

Here Don offers an intimate glimpse into his own life and career. He discusses the current phase of his work: traveling the world and applying Spiral Dynamics to various geo-political “hotspots” all over the planet. He offers his own ideas about healthy models of society, the crucial distinction between stages of consciousness and the contents of those stages, and the importance of preserving many of the early stages of development that are so often seen as primitive and obsolete. He then goes into considerable depth around the specifics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, describing the needs and problems on both sides of the divide, his hands-on involvement with both nations, and the remarkable receptivity with which his work has been met. At a time when tensions in the Middle East can seem so hopelessly combustible, it is encouraging to see Integral seeds being planted in such surprisingly fertile soil, offering us all a much-needed exhale as we wait to see how evolution will continue playing itself out in this difficult region of the world.

The Middle East: Leveling the Laws of the Land

Ken Wilber

In this video, Ken is asked about one of the most difficult and pressing issues of our time: the violence in the Middle East. How can the West help influence the overall growth of the Middle East, from renegade states to civil societies? Do democratic solutions have any chance of helping a region which, to quote Winston Churchill, “continues to produce more history than it can possibly digest”?

Is the Future Spinning Out of Control?

Ken Wilber

“Is everything spinning out of control?” asked an Associated Press article in Summer 2008. Between rising flood waters in the Midwest, drowning polar bears in the far North, skyrocketing gas prices, plummeting home values, and endless wars on multiple fronts, the future does not seem to be living up to its promise—a promise envisioned since the détente of the Cold War and the proclamation of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.” From an Integral altitude, what can we make of the future?

PREVIOUSLY: